New Walk (and Bike) City

Image courtesy of the NYC Dept of Transportation

So Turnstone’s updates here were scare during a chunk of 2012, and here’s my excuse: I took an 8-month walk around New York, a bit like Phyllis Pearsall, tireless authoress of the London A-Z, did in the 1930s. I went analog and on secondment to join a larger design team for a really special project:

Transportation Nation and Brooklyn Spoke explain exactly what for in these previews of the NYC Department of Transportation pedestrian and bike share wayfinding systems, projects that are set to appear across the city in 2013. More about those to follow here in the coming months as the projects get off – and on – the ground.

Meantime, if you look lost at any intersection on or off the grid, the person approaching you to give you directions, whether you’d asked for them or not, is probably me.

Oh IXD, Oh Sandy

Back in Fall 2012, I taught this class on the Design of Systems to the first year Interaction Design MFA graduate students at the School of Visual Arts.

I was channeling, but not explicit enough about, the work of Durrell Bishop, and my work about his work – unpacking his brilliantly simple and complex notion that digital products should now embody the systems of our using them, since they no longer have to take the shape of the sum of the mechanical parts they contain. Shh, and think about that for a minute.

Annnyway, we did have guest lectures from Barry Richards of Rockwell Group, the designers of the Imagination Playground, that UNICEF just launched in Haiti; Chelsea Mauldin, my erstwhile Design Trust collaborator and now Director of the Public Policy Lab; Nick Abadzis, comic book artist extraordinaire; and Noel Wilson, intrepid industrial designer with Engineers Without Borders spin-off, Catapult Design out of San Francisco. We also got ourselves properly paranoid reading Andrew Blum’s Tubes, and tiptoeing through Trevor Paglen’s incredible photography of undocumented military and industrial installations, right before Creative Time launched his Last Pictures exhibit. We even had a field trip to IKEA. It was not a boring syllabus.

Then Superstorm Sandy became not only the disruptive force that diverted us from showing up in Week 6, and from starting then completing the deep and wide class blog, but also became the focus of the final projects. Those are summarized by the students here and were critiqued by Ian Spalter of Foursquare, Scott Peterman from Parsons and Tony Moulton from Occupy Sandy.

“That was more the philosophy than the design of systems” said one student in the last class, not unhappily. Anything to make makers think and thinkers make, I say.

On air, up in the AA air

American Airlines’ inflight business show, Talk Business 360, interviews Turnstone Consulting in its latest episode, talking about visual scribing. If you travel on an AA or US Airways flight anywhere in the world during April and May, business or coach class, you’ll be able to listen to the whole program from your seat, on Channel 9. That’s on air to five million passengers up in the air. And, for terrestrial listeners, Turnstone’s 3-minute segment is available here:

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Graphic Novelists/Novel Graphics

Images for AIGA NY courtesy of (top) Nick Abadzis and (below) G.B.Tran

Get your Hallowe’en costume sorted early and get excited for this:
Super-honored to announce that on Tuesday Oct 30, Turnstone will be moderating a very special conversation between two titans of graphical storytelling: Eisner Award-winning Nick Abadzis (Hugo Tate, Laika) and G.B.Tran (author of Vietnamerica, one of Time Magazine’s all-time Top 10 Graphic Memoirs).

The event is organized by AIGA New York and co-hosted by MoCA, the Museum of Chinese in America, to tie in with their current exhibits, Alt.Comics/Marvels and Monsters. Alt.comics showcases an incredible, poignant, funny, beautiful array of comics by Asian American comic book artists and graphic novelists. Marvels and Monsters looks at depictions of Asians in (ahem, stereotypes perpetuated by) American comics since the 1940s.

Abadzis and Tran come together to share with a wide audience of MoCA members, comic book fans, and AIGA members their inspiration, approaches to historical and personal research and pen-to-pixel working methods. It’s my privilege to introduce them. It should be a special night.

MoCA is at 215 Centre Street, New York, NY 10013 – between Howard and Grand Streets, a block north of Canal St. The event runs 630-830pm and tickets are available here. Come thru!

[Postscript: This event was cancelled due to the inauspicious arrival of Superstorm Sandy on October 29, and due to scheduling conflicts, it was not possible to reschedule later in the year, while the exhibit was still up]

On board at AIGA New York

I’ve recently accepted an invitation to join the board of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Graphics Arts (AIGA). For 30 years, the organization has been at the center of professional design practice and it’s an honor to participate at this stage. Led by Board Chair, Willy Wong and in esteemed company, I’m thankful to the team who elected us newcomers. Over the coming year, I look forward to contributing and to steering some of the ideas, issues and inspiration Turnstone has been gathering here, towards to new and familiar audiences.

Services are Everywhere: Turnstone at AIGA National Design Conference

Turnstone joined Zipcar and Facebook to introduce “Services Are Everywhere” to the annual AIGA National Design Conference in Phoenix, AZ this Fall: The all-women panel kicked off four sessions on service design, moderated by innovation consultancy, Continuum. Click the clip here to watch this recently released, short’n'sweet film of the presenters’ perspectives, from Disney, Facebook, the Mayo Clinic, My Police, Sony, Turnstone, Zipcar and others.

Turnstone in words and pictures

Turnstone has returned to its drawing roots this year, inspired by collaborations with Ludic Group, the international innovation consultancy. By invitation, Rachel takes visual notes for corporate-level strategy meetings. Sample concept drawings and diagrams from closed client sessions can’t be shared, but more illustrative images are here on the Turnstone web site. Rachel also presented at  LaydeezDoComics in London in December 2011.

In September, QR This, Turnstone’s review of the Museum of Modern Art’s interactive media exhibit, Talk to Me, appeared in the Architect’s Newspaper.

Turnstone in collaboration

In 2011, Turnstone participated in Amplify Brooklyn, run in November by the DESIS Lab at Parsons, the New School for Design, as part of their Open Design for Organizational Innovation initiative, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The one-day workshop brought together designers, social scientists and practitioners to use fieldwork and other design methods to address the organizational challenges of a non-profit organization in North Brooklyn. Here’s a short film about the workshop, Open Design for Organizational Innovation from Parsons Desis Lab on Vimeo:

In the spring, Turnstone also joined a team of architects and designers from Italy, Portugal and Hungary to submit a proposal to EUROPAN 11, a competition for regenerating a section of the town of Szeged, Hungary. Of 70 entrants, ours was a finalist, commended for its strategy, though none of the projects, not even the winner, will be realized. The EU has more pressing matters to attend to…?

Turnstone’s sideproject, dilys+asante, created more hit party props for the award-winning I Love Vinyl party’s second anniversary in May, as featured in Time Out in June. Even us strategists need to get hands on. And our dance on.

Happy New Year! The 2011 Round Up: Turnstone inspired

Happy 2012. In 2011, Turnstone got the most out of

Tweeting more than blog posting. Follow @TurnstoneTweets.
Postcards from Penguin, 100 classic book covers
Sol Le Witt at Mass MoCA
The drawings of Kelsey Dake
Fifteen minutes listening to Nobel prize-winner, Leymah Gbowee
Symeon Brown‘s take on the riots at the London Policy Conference.
The Power of Making at the Victoria & Albert Museum
Christina Stampfli joining Turnstone
Graphic Details, female graphic novelists and cartoonists, exhibiting in NYC, touring in 2012
Steve Jobs, and many more, RIP
Ryoji Ikeda’s The Transfinite at The Armory on the Park, NYC (above)

Turnstone remembers

Turnstone remembers two inspiring friends and coworkers, who both passed away in the past year and a half:

Angelo Kontarinis was a great friend at and after our time working together at IBM, and Sylvia Harris, among many other things, a collaborator, champion for women in business, designers of color, decent design for citizens, and personally, she was a fairy godmother to the Taxi07: Roads Forward project. Both were great designers and, above all, really good people, both missed.

The Sylvia Harris Citizen Design Award has been established to support projects that inform and inspire the public, and the dedicated designers who create them. Details about contributing funds to the Award are here.